An email autoresponder sequence or series helps you automate your email marketing campaign while at the same time, nurturing your leads and making more conversions. Building an effective email autoresponder sequence is a powerful tactic that makes our lives as marketers much, much easier.

Whether you’re a beginner or advanced marketer, use these six steps to guide you in creating your own powerful autoresponder sequence:

1. Choosing an End Goal for Your Email Campaign

What is the end goal of your email autoresponders? Making that decision is the first step. Do you want to sell a physical product? Maybe you’re launching a new service or looking to strengthen your relationship with subscribers as they move further through your sales funnel?

Either way, before you begin building your autoresponder series you must first define the end goal.

Demographics, buyer personas, sales funnel stage, or interests are just a few common ways to break down your list into small, specific groups. This is also known as segmenting your email list. We should know by now that segmenting your email gets you higher open rates (14%), lower unsubscriber rates (8.54%), as well as a better overall ROI on your email marketing campaigns.

There are a few different goals a marketer could have when using an email autoresponder sequence in their email marketing strategy.

A welcome sequence for new subscribers Free mini-courses and lead magnets

Put your sales funnel on autopilot Promote up-sells and add-ons

3. Choose Your Email Autoresponder Software

To schedule and send out your email autoresponders, you’ll need an email marketing program that will fit your business’s needs. If you already have an email marketing software, good news, you can skip to Step 4!

At The Modern Entrepreneurs Club, we use Getresponse CRM because of all the advanced features for lead scoring, automation, and most importantly, segmenting our email lists. There are plenty of other options out there for you though! MailChimp and AWeber are quite user-friendly, perfect for beginners or small businesses.

4. Map Out Your Autoresponder Sequence

Setting up the sequence of your email autoresponders is dependent on your goals and business. Someone selling an information product won’t have the same sequence as someone offering a physical product. Decide how many ‘content’ emails you are going to send before you send a ‘promotion’ (sales) email.

Across the board, autoresponder sequences do typically look like this:

If your business is more content-based, this sequence might be better suited to your marketing efforts:

5. Create an Effective Autoresponder

Now this is an important step of setting up effective email autoresponder sequences, and it can be one of the most tricky. In fact, you may want to outsource this task to a copywriter! If you’re feeling confident, then the below list will set-up the foundations for sending out effective email autoresponses:

Focus on the reader

Consider who is sending the message

Maker it personal

Highlight value

Craft an incredible subject line

Proofread, proofread, proofread!

Easy-to-read

Always add a CTA

6. Monitor, Test, and Optimize Your Email Autoresponder

Autoresponders are mostly ‘set and forget’ but like all things in our world of marketing, we must constantly monitor, test, and optimize. These are just a few of the questions to ask yourself after you’ve set up your email autoresponder series:

Is this autoresponder still relevant to your list? Could it be segmented further?

Are your subject lines being A/B tested?

Are the goals of your subscribers changing and evolving? How can you solve their current issues?

Finally, Open rates, click-through rates, and unsubscribes are the metrics that should be measured against the effectiveness of an autoresponder series.